International Mobile Roaming

Mobile roaming is the ability to make and receive voice calls and use data when travelling outside the geographic coverage area of your network. This means when you travel outside New Zealand and use your mobile phone you will incur additional charges.

Before you depart, discuss your travel plans with your mobile phone service provider. Whether you are visiting one or more countries, you can choose a mobile roaming package to suit. First, consider how you will use your phone abroad. It’s recommended you look at your current phone usage to better understand the potential costs of International Mobile Roaming services if you continue to use your phone in the same way while overseas.

To help prevent large roaming charges, you can control how much you spend with a data cap, or monthly bill limit set up with your provider. Also, it’s important to proactively manage and monitor your phone usage, to avoid unexpected costs.

Tips for reducing roaming data consumption:

Ensure data roaming is switched off before you depart, and only switch it on when you require it, to prevent background downloads and updates from using roaming data.

Check information about international mobile roaming costs.When you commence roaming you service provider will send you an initial text containing the cost of phone and data services, and how to find out more information about charges and usage at no cost to you while overseas.

To give you an idea of how much data you might use while roaming, have a look at the below table. These estimates are based on average smartphone consumption using a 4G network. Data usage will vary depending on several factors including, but not limited to, device used, network used, device settings and applications on the device. If you are connected to 3G services, your data usage is likely to be less than that detailed in the table below: